Locusts engineered as biorobotic sensing machines | KurzweilAI

Washington University in St. Louis engineers have developed an innovatiave “bio-hybrid nose” that could be used in homeland security applications, such as detecting explosives, replacing state-of-the-art miniaturized chemical sensing devices limited to a handful of sensors.

Compare that to the locust antenna (where their chemical sensors are located): “it has several hundreds of thousands of sensors and of a variety of types,” says Baranidharan Raman, associate professor of biomedical engineering, who has received a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Office of Naval Research (ONR).